...Never have so many done so much to reveal so little than in the collected journalism about presidential nomination contests. The personality-driven trivia. The hokey generalizations. The bogs of conventional wisdom. The day-by-day scorekeeping that ends up worse than uninformative; it is anti-informative. (Just ask Presidents George Romney, Edmund Muskie, Scoop Jackson, John Connally, Richard Gephardt, and Hillary Rodham Clinton.)

Everyone noticed that this morning's [Michael Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo New York] Times story on HRC emails and "criminal investigation" was already being altered and significantly rebutted and walked back by around 9 am? It's unbelievable...

Live from Evans Hall: The curse of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon continues...

The Republican Party elites thought that they could trap a large chunk of what was the white nativist and racist chunk of America in with the elites (and so they could deploy their votes), but instead the Republican Party elites find that they are trapped in with what is now their base (and so have no choice but to at least pretend to adopt their policies):

This weekly feature really is supposed to be part of my own autocritique--my attempt to keep myself from getting too swelled a head, and to help me mark my beliefs to market.

But everytime I try to get out, they drag me back in...

I've said it before. I will say it again: There is something morally wrong with anybody who pays money to or receives money from The Washington Post. There has to be a limit. And the Post is well beyond it:

...given our history, given that historically when white women made claims, most of the times they were false about black men raping them, somebody ended up hanging from a tree. — Dr. Stacey Patton, author of The Washington Post, Op-Ed.

...was ratified in 1913. Still, every once in a while, the news will report the arrest of some right-wing kook who has failed to pay his income tax on the grounds that it’s illegal. Also in 1913, the 17th Amendment, requiring the popular election of senators (who before then were often appointed by state legislatures) took effect. And yet many conservatives still want to repeal it--and not just kooks, or at least influential kooks and not just completely marginal and obscure kooks [but Antonin Scalia, Rick Perry, now-Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), and Ted Cruz (R-Texas). And those things happened more than a century ago. So how long will the Obamacare resistance live on? A long, long time....

...described a recent telephone call with Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, in which he said Mr. Walker had assured him he had not completely renounced his earlier support for a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. "I’m not going nativist, I’m pro-immigration," Mr. Walker said, according to Mr. Moore’s account.... On Sunday... Moore said... that the call had never actually taken place...

Let us remember the days when the Old New Republic, under the ownership of Marty Peretz and the editorship of Franklin Foer put forward people who are, shall we say, not very quantitative to make "the case against Keynes... [and] Krugman", and for austerity.

...to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians, using several different rationales.

Pity the high-school or college student who puts up a hand to contest that anymore. They don’t. They know the Orwellian option now is to stay down.... Weak school administrators and academics empowered tireless activists who [have] forced all of American history and life through the four prisms of class, gender, ethnicity and identity. What emerged at the other end was one idea—guilt. I exist, therefore I must be guilty. Of something. The College Board promises that what it produces next month will be ‘balanced.’ We await the event.

Which part of that Key Concept do Daniel Henninger and the Wall Street Journal editorial board believe should be contested, and wish to contest? The subjugation of Africans? The continued subjugation of African-Americans? The subjugation of American Indians? The belief in white supremacy? The link between subjugation on the one hand and belief in white supremacy on the other? The claim that there were different rationales for white supremacy in different times and places?

It is very nice to see the Financial Timescorrection of Niall Ferguson--although it does not, in my opinion, go far enough.

A word, however, to Lionel Barber, Gillian Tett, and company: The Financial Times's only current assets are an incredibly skilled and hard-working journalistic team and a reputation as a trusted information intermediary. You are not going to be able to out-pander the Spectator, the Wall Street Journal, the Torygraph, and Fox News as a place where the rich feel comforted rather than afflicted by the news. That means you cannot risk your reputation as a trusted information intermediary by routinely publishing pieces that undermine it.

"Obama's failure to transcend America's partisan divide is not the result of a deliberate decision by the Republican Party to deepen that divide, but rather of Obama's failure to lead, with leadership." That is something that professional Green-Lantern "centrists" like Clive Crook and Ron Fournier have said. That is something they continue to say--even though moderate Republicans' talking point now is: Pelosi and Reid kept Obama from being the bipartisan centrist president he wanted to be.

I wonder why they have not yet smelled the coffee, and gotten the memo. It would be easy to shift to: "Obama tried to lead, but Pelosi and Reid refused to follow". It would be more plausible and not more untrue than the current position. So why not shift?

Hoisted from the Archives: I understand that the Old New Republic was at times (save for firing him) very good to the very sharp Timothy Noah. But he says some things he shouldn't in and ancillary to a very nice tweetstorm:

2.) Things didn't go sour for @tnr when @FranklinFoer got fired. To whatever extent there was an abrupt break from past glories ...

I wonder why nobody at the New York Review of Books bothered to edit him, or even to tell Massing that this was not the way to introduce himself to readers searching for trusted information intermediaries?

Ben Thompson's point was:

The world needs great journalism, but great journalism needs a great business model. That’s exactly what BuzzFeed seems to have, and it’s for that reason the company is the most important news organization in the world...

Does Massing engage that point--acknowledge its existence, argue against it, or provide support for it--anywhere in his piece? No.

...of journalist Theodore H. White by the writer Scott Porch. White invented the genre of modern presidential campaign books with The Making of the President, 1960 (and then 1964, 1968 and 1972). The 1960 version, which won a Pulitzer Prize and sold four million copies, describes John F. Kennedy as a ‘forlorn and lonesome young man … lithe as an athlete … handsome and tired, with just a fleck of gray now in his glossy brown hair’ who ‘baffled’ the ‘old-line politicians of Tammany.’ Then after Kennedy was assassinated, White helped Jackie Kennedy create the ‘Camelot’ myth of his presidency.

Live from La Farine: if I did not already know that we have 17 months during which the flow and intensity of the bullshit from the Washington Village media political press corps will only increase, I would have thought we were at peak bullshit now.

Do people really pay $1000 a year to read things like this beat-sweetener from Tim Alberta in the National Journal about how:

South Carolina is Marco Rubio's State to Lose.... Rubio is putting a stranglehold on South Carolina.... Rubio has become an adopted prince of South Carolina's political royalty... snatching up the state's top talent... achieved... an organizational lock... 'put together a first-class team'... courtship... goes beyond his roster of official allies... that's only a fraction of the South Carolina talent Rubio has on payroll... Whit Ayres, Rubio's highly respected pollster, launched his career in South Carolina... crucial hire... Katie Baham Gainey, a veteran of First Tuesday Strategies and Romney's 2008 campaign... "He has an all-star team"... courtship of South Carolina goes beyond his roster of official allies... been at the task of building alliances here for six years...

?

This beat-sweetener that in paragraph 26--twenty-six--TWENTY-SIX--XXVI--finally says:

The most recent poll was conducted by Winthrop before Rubio's April 13 launch and showed him taking only 4 percent, lagging behind Walker, Bush, and five other candidates...

That's eighth place.

The one piece of real information in the article, delayed until paragraph 26.

While supporters in Iowa noted that she had doubled her standing in state polls, it was a statistically insignificant change from 1 percent to 2 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll released May 6. (That may seem piddling, but the same poll had Mr. Santorum, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2012, also at 2 percent, while 5 percent supported Mr. Bush)

Must-Read: I am getting the same sense that Matthew Yglesias is with respect to the Mainstream Media. But it would be good if there were actual numbers on the coverage of the HRC campaign and the Clinton Foundation out there...

Matthew YglesiasNewsletter: "It's difficult to know when one is or isn't thinking with partisan blinders on...

Dennis Hastert, the Republican Speaker... a hulking former wrestling coach, is a fairly straightforward conservative: antiabortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-Kyoto, pro-invading Iraq, pro-death penalty.... Hastert got a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union in the days when he voted regularly....

Compared with other “red” districts, Hastert’s (Illinois’s fourteenth) is deep scarlet. It begins in the suburbs thirty miles west of the Chicago Loop and then stretches out through miles of cornfields to a point just forty miles short of the Iowa border. To drive across it takes a good three hours. Hastert’s district can claim to be the most Republican in the country, at least if you factor in length of loyalty to the party Unlike nouveaux droites such as Texas, Illinois has been full of Republicans since the party’s founding in 1854.... Hastert’s district is resolutely “normal.” The local citizens think of themselves as typical Americans, and their geographical vision is often bounded by the Great Plains that surround them.

Live from Strada at Bancroft and College: Last year's journamalism. Is there a trend, is there a number that is correct? And is there an argument other than the sadistic undercurrent that the bottom third of America's white population (and a much greater fraction of the minority population) deserve to be fleeced by credit-card and payday-loan companies, and deserve to die prematurely from lack of routine and preventative care?

Live from La-La Land: Is Maureen Dowd really this clueless as to how she is appearing to Uber drivers--and to her readers?

Maureen Dowd: Driving Uber Mad: "I had Uber. Even in the land of movie stars, you could feel like a movie star when your Uber chauffeur rolled up...

...But, suddenly, they scattered in the opposite direction. I stood in the driveway, perplexed. Finally, a car pulled up, and the driver waved me in. ‘Do you know why no one wanted to pick you up?’ he asked. ‘Because you have a low rating.’... I was shocked. Blinded by the wondrous handiness of Uber, I had missed the fact that while I got to rate them, they got to rate me back. Revealing that I had only 4.2 stars, my driver continued to school me. ‘You don’t always come out right away,’ he said, sternly, adding that I would have to work hard to be more appealing if I wanted to get drivers to pick me up. Uber began to feel less like a dependable employee and more like an irritated boyfriend....

...and his obsession with 'values' and 'meaning' and whatnot, let's all pause to recall that he's a shameless liar and fantasist who doesn't even have the grace to acknowledge it when he's caught. (I mean, in addition to the fact that he has the intelligence of a sea slug and the moral sophistication of a stoat.)

Sasha Issenberg: [Boo-Boos in Paradise(http://www.phillymag.com/articles/booboos-in-paradise/): "I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work...

Over at Equitable Growth Much of the dysfunction of the American press corps is driven by the ideological commitments of its bosses, the cultural flaws of its journalists' communities, or the desperate need to scare its readers and viewers and thus keep them reading and viewing so that their eyeballs can be sold to advertisers.

Some of the dysfunction is not. Some of the dysfunction is unmotivated and completely pointless, even on its own terms.

Here we have Eugene Stern warning readers that reading Nick Kristof of The New York Times will not make you better informed: READ MOAR

In the immediate aftermath of David Brooks's failure to know that Jean-Paul Sartre's name was not John-Paul, it is time to hoist from Commonweal's archives the most extraordinary David Brooks error ever:

...[They say that because] the FOMC's projections of economic growth have been too high... monetary policy is not working and efforts to use it to support the recovery should be discontinued. It's generous of the WSJ writers to note... that 'economic forecasting isn't easy.' They should know, since the Journal has been forecasting a breakout in inflation and a collapse in the dollar at least since 2006, when the FOMC decided not to raise the federal funds rate above 5-1/4 percent.... READ MOAR

What’s the allegation against Hillary Clinton? The reason this is a story is the potential that there was some quid pro quo involved: that in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation and/or the speech Bill Clinton gave in Russia, Hillary Clinton used her position as Secretary of State to make approval of this sale happen. It need not be explicit, but at the very least there has to be a connection between donations and official action that Clinton took.

...ostensibly... lighthearted laughs. But it's evolved into a recital of brutal truths — albeit one neither side ever really admits happened. The joke of President Obama's performance on Saturday was that he wasn't joking. Everyone just had to pretend he was. Take this:

I think Corey Robin nails it here. My only objection is that he does not draw the links back to earlier, early twentieth-century attacks on "boring" politics--the "cretinism of parliaments" and similar doctrines: